Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (33 page)

The Leopold Obermayer case has already given some indication of the system’s particular hatred of homosexuals. A measure of liberalization of anti-homosexual laws and regulations had been achieved during the Weimar years, but once the Nazis came to power the prohibitions became harsher, especially after the liquidation of SA leadership in June 1934 (Ernst Röhm and some of the main SA leaders were notorious homosexuals). Homophobia was unusually shrill within the SS. A 1935 article in
Das Schwarze Korps
demanded the death penalty for homosexual activities, and the following year Himmler created a Reich Central Office for Combatting Homosexuality and Abortion.
⁹⁷
During the Nazi period, some ten to fifteen thousand homosexuals were incarcerated.
⁹⁸
How many died in the camps is unknown, but according to one Dachau inmate, “the prisoners with the pink triangle did not live very long; they were quickly and systematically exterminated by the SS.”
⁹⁹

In many ways Obermayer’s story remains exemplary.

By mid-October 1935, it will be remembered, Leopold Obermayer was back in Dachau. This time, however, using both the most diverse legal and moral arguments and his status as a Swiss citizen, Obermayer fought back. Most of his letters and petitions were seized by the Dachau censors and passed on to his chief tormentor, the Würzburg Gestapo head Josef Gerum; his defense strategy was undermined by his new lawyer, a run-of-the-mill Nazi; the hopes he set on a decisive intervention by the Swiss authorities never materialized (as Broszat and Fröhlich have put it, the Swiss probably did not consider that the case of a Jewish homosexual was worth an entanglement with Germany).
¹⁰⁰
Nonetheless Obermayer’s relentless complaints, and the uncertainty of the Bavarian Political Police and the Justice Ministry in Berlin as to just how ready the Swiss would be to turn Obermayer’s case into an international scandal, profoundly unsettled Gerum and even some of his superiors in Munich and Berlin.
¹⁰¹
Thus, throughout 1936, the determined resistance of a Jewish homosexual, albeit one benefiting from foreign citizenship, could still induce a measure of uncertainty in the operations of the system. Be that as it may, Obermayer’s trial could not be delayed indefinitely. The case was referred to the Würzburg Criminal Court; the trial was scheduled for December 9, 1936. The prosecution intended to concentrate on the accused’s homosexual activities, mainly his perversion of German youth (Obermayer himself never denied his homosexuality but steadfastly argued that the relations he had with younger men had never gone beyond the limits set by the law).
¹⁰²

In November it dawned on the Würzburg Gestapo and the state prosecution that, given his personality and defiance, Obermayer would be able to use the courtroom to argue that Hitler himself knew of the homosexual relations within the SA leadership and had accepted them until June 30, 1934.
¹⁰³
Thus the trial had to take place behind closed doors, and whereas Obermayer lost his last chance of embarrassing his persecutors, the propaganda machinery of the party and the Gestapo also lost the opportunity of staging a show trial. (As will be seen, a similar situation was to arise years later with regard to the planned show trial of Herschel Grynszpan, the Jewish youth who in November 1938 shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath.)

Little is known about the trial itself, but even the reports in the local Nazi press indicate that Obermayer defended himself astutely. The sentence was a foregone conclusion: life imprisonment. Obermayer was kept in a regular prison until 1942, when he was transferred into the hands of the SS and sent to Mauthausen; there he died on February 22, 1943. After presenting his own version of the events to a de-Nazification court in 1948, Josef Gerum was set free.
104

Throughout the thirties the sterilization drive inaugurated in July 1933 went steadily forward. When the health argument could not easily be used for racial purposes, other methods were found. Thus the new regime had barely been established when the attention of the authorities was directed to a group probably numbering no more than five to seven hundred, the young offspring of German women and colonial African soldiers serving in the French military occupation of the Rhineland during the early postwar years. In Nazi jargon these were the “Rhineland bastards.”
¹⁰⁵
Hitler had already described this “black pollution of German blood” in
Mein Kampf
as one more method used by the Jews to undermine the racial fiber of the
Volk
.

As early as April 1933, Göring as Prussian minister of the interior requested the registration of these “bastards,” and a few weeks later the ministry ordered that they undergo a racial-anthropological evaluation.
¹⁰⁶
In July a study of thirty-eight of these schoolchildren was undertaken by a certain Abel, one of racial anthropologist Eugen Fischer’s assistants at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. As could be expected, Abel found that his subjects, all of them living in the Rhineland, showed various defects in intellectual ability and behavior. The Prussian ministry reported the findings on March 28, 1934, warning of dire racial consequences if, despite their very small number, these “bastards” were allowed to reproduce. The upshot of the argument was that, since the presence in France of half a million mixed breeds would lead within four or five generations to the bastardization of half the French population, the similar presence of mixed breeds on the German side of the border would lead to local miscegenation and the consequent disappearance of any racial difference between the French and the population of the adjacent western parts of the Reich.
¹⁰⁷

That the matter was not taken lightly is shown by a meeting of the Advisory Committee for Population and Racial Policy of the Ministry of the Interior, which on March 11, 1935, convened representatives of the ministries of the Interior, Health, Justice, Labor, and Foreign affairs as well as eugenicists from the academic world. Walter Gross did not hide the difficulties in handling the problem of what he called the “Negro bastards” (
Negerbastarde
). Their rapid expulsion was impossible; thus, Gross left no doubt about the need for sterilization. But sterilization of a healthy population, if carried out openly, could cause serious internal and external reactions. As the reliability of ordinary practitioners was not to be depended on, Gross saw no other way but to demand the secret intervention of physicians who were also seasoned party members and would understand the imperatives of the higher good of the
Volk
.
¹⁰⁸
In the course of 1937, these hundreds of boys and girls were identified, picked up by the Gestapo, and sterilized.
¹⁰⁹

The convolutions of Nazi thinking remain, however, inscrutable. As the party agencies were plotting the sterilization of the “Negro bastards,” Bormann sent confidential instructions to all Gauleiters regarding “German colonial Negroes”: the fifty or so blacks from the former German colonies living in Germany could not find any employment, according to the Reichsleiter, “because when they found some work their employer encountered hostile reactions and had to dismiss the Negroes.” Bormann was ready to have employment authorizations issued to them in order to help them find steady work; any individual action against them was prohibited.
¹¹⁰
The Reichsleiter did not even mention the question of progeny. Were these blacks married to German women? Did they have racially mixed children? Were these children to be sterilized? It seems that none of these questions even crossed the mind of the prime racial fanatic Martin Bormann.

The decision to sterilize carriers of hereditary diseases and the so-called feeble-minded was based on medical examinations and specially devised intelligence tests. The results were submitted to hereditary health courts, whose decisions were in turn forwarded for review to heredity health appellate courts; only their final verdicts were mandatory. Some three-quarters of the total of approximately four hundred thousand individuals sterilized in Nazi Germany underwent the operation before the beginning of the war.
¹¹¹
But only part of the sterilized population ultimately survived. For mental patients sterilization was often but a first stage: During the late thirties they were the group most at risk in Nazi Germany.

As early as the last years of the republic, patients at mental institutions were increasingly considered to be a burden on the community, “superfluous beings,” people whose lives were “unworthy of living.” The Nazi regime spared no effort to disseminate the right attitudes toward asylum inmates. Organized tours of mental institutions were meant to demonstrate both the freakish appearance of mental patients and the unnecessary costs that their upkeep entailed. Thus, for example, in 1936 the Munich asylum Eglfing-Haar was toured by members of the SA’s Reich Leadership School, by local SS race experts, by instructors of the SS regiment “Julius Schreck,” and by several groups from the Labor Front.”
¹¹²
A crop of propaganda films aimed at indoctrinating the wider public were produced and shown during the same years,”
¹¹³
and in schools, appropriate exercises in arithmetic demonstrated the financial toll such inmates imposed on the nation’s economy.
¹¹⁴

Whether these educational measures indicated a systematic preparation of public opinion for the extermination of the inmates is unclear, but in this domain—more so than in many others—one can follow the direct impact of ideology on the regime’s policies from 1933 on. According to Lammers, Hitler had already mentioned the possibility of euthanasia in 1933, and according to his physician, Karl Brandt, Hitler had discussed the subject with the Reich physicians’ leader Wagner in 1935, indicating that such a project would be easier to carry out in wartime.
¹¹⁵
Nonetheless, starting in 1936, mental patients were gradually being concentrated in large state-run institutions, and reliable SS personnel was placed on the staffs of some private institutions. Given this trend, it is not surprising that, in March 1937,
Das Schwarze Korps
had no compunction in praising a father who had killed his handicapped son.
¹¹⁶

The privately run institutions were well aware of the ominous aspect of these developments. In fact, what is chilling about the documentation of the years 1936–38 is that “the associations established for the care of the handicapped [Protestant religious groups such as the Inner Mission] often…denounced those left to their care and thereby helped to bring about their persecution and extermination.”
¹¹⁷
Many of the religious institutions that were losing some of their inmates as a result of the regrouping of patients into state institutions did complain—but only about the economic difficulties such transfers were causing them.
¹¹⁸

The first concrete step toward a euthanasia policy was taken in the fall of 1938. The father of an infant born blind, retarded, and with no arms and legs petitioned Hitler for the right to a “mercy death” for his son. Karl Brandt, was sent to Leipzig, where the Knauer baby was hospitalized, to consult with the doctors in charge and perform the euthanasia, which he did.
¹¹⁹

As will be seen further on, the planning of euthanasia was accelerated during the first months of 1939. Nonetheless Hitler acted with prudence. He was aware that the killing of mentally ill adults or of infants with grave defects could encounter staunch opposition from the churches, the Catholic Church in particular. This potential obstacle was all the more significant as the largely Catholic population and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Austria had just given their enthusiastic endorsement to the Anschluss. Thus, in late 1938, Hartl, head of SD desk II 113 (political churches), received (via Heydrich) an order from Viktor Brack, the deputy of Philipp Bouhler (head of the Führer’s Chancellery), to prepare an “opinion” about the church’s attitude toward euthanasia.
¹²⁰
Hartl did not feel competent to produce such an evaluation, but he contacted Father Joseph Mayer, professor of moral theology at the Philosophical-Theological Academy in Paderborn, who in 1927 had already written favorably about sterilization of the mentally ill. In the early fall of 1939, Hard received Mayer’s detailed memorandum, which summed up the pros and cons in Catholic pronouncements on the subject. The memorandum has not been found, and we do not know whether the Paderborn cleric expressed his own view on euthanasia, but it seems that even if his conclusion was indeterminate, it left the door open for exceptions.
¹²¹

Through indirect channels Brack’s office submitted Mayer’s memorandum to Bishop Berning and to the papal nuncio, Monsignor Cesare Orsenigo. On the Protestant side, it was submitted to Pastors Paul Braune and Friedrich von Bodelschwingh. It seems that no opposition was voiced by any of the German clerics—Catholic or Protestant—contacted by Hider’s Chancellery. The pope’s delegate, too, remained silent.
¹²²

^*
Carl von Ossietzky was a left-wing German journalist and passionate pacifist. He as awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935, while imprionsed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

CHAPTER
7

Paris, Warsaw, Berlin—and Vienna

I

As the storm gathered over Europe, throughout the Continent the Jews once again became objects of widespread debate, targets of suspicion and sometimes of outright hatred. The general ideological and political cleavages of the mid-thirties were the main source of change, but in countries other than Nazi Germany, a pervasive atmosphere of crisis prepared the ground for a new surge of anti-Jewish extremism.

The first signs of this radicalization had appeared at the beginning of the decade. Growing doubts about the validity of the existing order of things arose as a result of the economic crisis but also because of a more general discontent. By dint of an almost “natural” reaction, the Jews were identified—and not only on the extreme right—with one or another aspect of the apparent social and cultural disintegration, and were held responsible for some of its worst consequences. It was a time when the Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, no fanatic as such, could glorify France’s arch-anti-Semite of the late nineteenth century, Edouard Drumont, the notorious editor of
La Libre Parole
and author of
La France Juive
, and lash out at the Jewish threat to Christian civilization.

In Bernanos’s 1931 book,
La grandepeur des bien-pensants
(The great fear of the right-thinking), the values threatened by what he perceived as an ever-increasing Jewish domination were those of Christian civilization and of the nation as a living organic entity. The new capitalist economy was controlled by the concentrated financial power of “
les gros
”—the mythical “two hundred families” that both Right and Left identified with the Jews.
¹
In other words the Jewish threat was, in part at least, that of
modernity
. The Jews were the forerunners, the masters, and the avid preachers of the doctrine of progress. To their French disciples, wrote Bernanos, they were bringing “a new mystique, admirably suited to that of Progress…. In this engineers’ paradise, naked and smooth like a laboratory, the Jewish imagination is the only one able to produce these monstrous flowers.”
²

La grande peur
ends with the darkest forebodings. In its last lines the Jews are left unnamed, but the whole logic of the text links the apocalyptic conclusion to Drumont’s lost fight against Jewry. The society being created before the author’s eyes was a godless one in which he felt unable to live: “There is no air!” he exclaimed. “But they won’t get us…they won’t get us alive!”
³

Bernanos’s anti-Semitism was passionate without necessarily being racist. It was part and parcel of an antimodernist and antiliberal trend that later would split into opposed camps with regard to Nazi Germany itself. It was the voice of suspicion, of contempt; it could demand exclusion. Such were among others, the anti-Jewish attitudes of a powerful group of European intellectuals steeped in Catholicism, either as believers or as men strongly influenced by their Catholic background: In France, such writers as Thierry Maulnier, Robert Brasillach, Maurice Bardèche, and a whole phalanx of Catholic and nationalist militants of the Action Française (the royalist movement founded by the ultranationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras at the beginning of he century) represented this trend; they either still belonged to Maurras’s movement or kept close ties to it. Paradoxically Maurras himself was not a believing Catholic, but he understood the importance of Catholicism for his “integral nationalism.” The church banned Action Française in 1926, yet many right-wing believers remained loyal to Maurras’s movement. In England such illustrious representatives of Catholicism as Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, and T. S. Eliot acknowledged their debt to Maurras, yet their anti-Jewish outbursts had a style and a force of their own. Catholic roots were explicitly recognized by Carl Schmitt, and their indirect influence on Heidegger is unquestionable. There was an apocalyptic tone in this militant right-wing Catholicism, a growing urge to engage in the final battle against the forces evoked by Bernanos, forces whose common denominator was usually the Jew.

Simultaneously, however, a growing cultural pessimism—whose political and religious roots were diffuse but that exuded a violent anti-Semitism of its own—was taking hold of various sectors of the European intellectual scene. Here, too, some of the most prominent French writers of the time took part: Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Paul Léautaud, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Maurice Blanchot, Marcel Jouhandeau, Jean Giraudoux, and Paul Morand. But it is not Céline’s 1937
Bagatelles pour un massacre
itself, possibly the most vicious anti-Jewish tirade in modern Western literature (apart from outright Nazi productions), that was most revealing, but André Gide’s favorable review of it in the
Nouvelle Revue Française
, under the guise that what Céline wrote in the book was not meant to be taken seriously.
⁴
And it was not Brasillach’s outspoken hatred of the Jews that was most indicative of the prevailing atmosphere, but the fact that Giraudoux, who had just launched a vitriolic attack against Jewish immigrants in
Pleins pouvoirs
, became minister of information during the last year of the Third Republic.
⁵

Against the background of this religious-cultural-civilizational crisis and its anti-Jewish corollaries, other, less abstract factors appear as causes of the general exacerbation of anti-Jewish attitudes and anti-Semitic agitation in countries other than Nazi Germany.

The convergence of the worldwide economic crisis and its sequel, decade-long unemployment, with the growing pressure of Jewish immigration into Western countries on the one hand, and economic competition from a large Jewish population in Central and Eastern Europe on the other, may have been the most immediate spur to hostility. But for millions of disgruntled Europeans and Americans the Jews were also believed to be among the beneficiaries of the situation, if not the manipulators of the dark and mysterious forces responsible for the crisis itself. Such constructs had penetrated all levels of society.

In countries such as France, England, and the United States, where some Jews had achieved prominence in journalism, in cultural life, and even in politics, prevailing European pacifism and American isolationism depicted Jewish protests against Nazi Germany as warmongering. The Jews were accused of serving their own interests rather than those of their countries. The French politician Gaston Bergery, a former Radical Socialist who became a collaborator during the German occupation, described in November 1938, in his periodical
La Flèche
(The arrow), how “the Jewish policy” of a war against Nazi Germany was perceived by the wider public: “A war—public opinion senses—less in order to defend France’s direct interests than to destroy the Hitler regime in Germany, that is, the death of millions of Frenchmen and [other] Europeans to avenge a few dead Jews and a few hundred thousand unfortunate Jews.”
⁶

Another immediately apparent factor was—as it had been in the earlier part of the century—the visibility of Jews on the militant left. In both Eastern Europe and France, identification of the Jews with the Marxist peril was partly as phantasmic as it had been in the past, but also partly confirmed by significant left-wing activism by Jews. Such activism arose for the same sociopolitical reasons that had played a decisive role several decades earlier. But in the thirties there were Jews, mainly in Western Europe, who became supporters of the Left in order to find a political expression for their anti-Nazism (at the same time in the Soviet Union, many Jews were falling victim to Stalin’s purges). In general terms, however—as had also been the case at the beginning of the century (and has been ever since)—the majority of European Jews identified themselves, and could be identified, with liberalism or social democracy, and, to a lesser extent, with traditional conservatism. At the same time, the crisis of the liberal system and the increasing discontent with democracy led to a growing hostility toward a group that, in addition to its partial identification with the Left, was regarded as the supporter and beneficiary of the liberal spirit both in the economy and in public life.

The spread of anti-Semitism on the European (and American) scene was one of the reasons for the growing difficulties placed in the way of Jewish emigration from Germany, then from Austria and the Sudetenland, and later from the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia. Traditional anti-Semitism was also one of the reasons that prompted the Polish government to take measures about the citizenship of nonresident Polish Jews that, as will be seen, gave the Nazis the necessary pretext for expelling thousands of Polish Jews residing in Germany. A few years later, this surge of anti-Jewish hostility was to have much more catastrophic results. The Jews themselves were only partly aware of the increasingly shaky ground on which they stood because, like so many others, they did not perceive the depth of liberal democracy’s crisis. The Jews in France believed in the strength of the Third Republic, and the Jews of East Central Europe believed in France. Few imagined that Nazi Germany could become a real threat beyond its own borders.

Eastern Europe’s participation in the growing anti-Jewish agitation of the second half of the thirties took place within the context of its own traditions. The influence of Christian anti-Jewish themes was particularly strong among populations whose majority was still a devout peasantry. Social resentment on the part of budding nationalistic middle classes of the positions acquired by Jews in commerce and the trades, light industry, banking, and the press, as well as in the prototypical middle-class professions of medicine and the law, created another layer of hostility. The latest and possibly strongest ingredient was the fierce anti-Bolshevism of regimes already oriented toward fascism, regimes for which identification of the Jews with Bolshevism was a common slogan—for example in Hungary, where the memory of the Béla Kun government remained vivid. In Poland these diverse elements merged with an exacerbated nationalism that tried to limit the influence of any and all minority groups, be they Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews, or Germans. By a somewhat different process, the wounded nationalism of the Hungarians and the Slovaks, and the megalo-maniacal nationalist fantasies of the Romanian radical right dreaming of a greater Dacia,
^*
led to the same anti-Semitic resentment. “Almost everywhere [in these countries],” writes Ezra Mendelsohn, “the Jewish question became a matter of paramount concern, and anti-Semitism a major political force.”
⁷

The leaders of the East Central European countries (Miklós Horthy in Hungary, Jósef Beck in Poland after Jósef Pilsudski’s death, Ion Antonescu in Romania) were already close to fascism or at least to extreme authoritarianism. All had to contend with ultra-right-wing movements—such as the Endek in Poland, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, and the Arrow Cross in Hungary—that sometimes appeared to be allies and sometimes enemies. The right-wing governments, mainly in Romania and Hungary, attempted to take the “wind out of the sails” of the radical right by adopting anti-Semitic policies of their own. Thus, Romania adopted an official anti-Semitic program by the end of 1937, and Hungary in 1938. The results were soon evident. As the Italian journalist Virginio Gayda, a semiofficial representative of the fascist regime, noted at the beginning of 1938, anti-Semitism was the point of “national cohesion” of the political scene in the Danubian states.
⁸

Anti-Semitism’s deepest roots in Poland were religious. In this profoundly Catholic country, the great majority of whose population still lived on the land or in small towns, the most basic Christian anti-Jewish themes remained a constant presence. In early 1937 Augustus Cardinal Hlond, the primate of Poland, distributed a pastoral letter that, among other things, addressed the Jewish issue. After pointing to the existence of a “Jewish problem” demanding “serious consideration,” the head of the Polish Church turned to its various aspects. “It is a fact,” Hlond declared, “that the Jews are struggling against the Catholic Church, that they are steeped in free thought, that they are the vanguard of godlessness, of the Bolshevik movement, and of subversive action. It is a fact that Jewish influence on morals is deplorable and that their publishing houses spread pornography. It is true that they are cheaters and carry on usury and white slave traffic. It is true that in the schools the influence of Jewish youth upon the Catholic is in general negative from the religious and moral point of view.” But in order to seem equitable, Cardinal Hlond then took a step back: “Not all the Jews are such as described. There are also faithful, righteous, honest, charitable and well-meaning Jews. In many Jewish families there is a wholesome and edifying family spirit. We know some people in the Jewish world who are morally prominent, noble and respectable.”

What attitudes did the cardinal therefore recommend to his flock? “I warn you against the moral attitude imported from abroad which is fundamentally and unconditionally anti-Jewish. This attitude is contrary to Catholic ethics. It is permissible to prefer one’s people; it is wrong to hate anyone. Not even Jews. In commercial relations it is right to favor one’s own people, to avoid Jewish shops and Jewish stalls on the market, but it is wrong to plunder Jewish shops, destroy Jewish goods, break windowpanes, throw bombs at their houses. It is necessary to find protection from the harmful moral influence of the Jews, to keep away from their anti-Christian culture, and in particular to boycott the Jewish press and demoralizing Jewish publications, but it is wrong to attack Jews, to beat, wound or libel them. Even in the Jew we must respect and love the man and neighbor, even though one may not be able to respect the inexpressible tragedy of this people which was the guardian of the Messianic idea and gave birth to our Savior. When God’s grace will enlighten the Jew and when he will sincerely join the fold of his and our Messiah, let us welcome him joyfully in the Christian ranks.